kalanjiam Community Banking Programme

DHAN Foundation initiated the Kalanjiam Community Banking Programme (KCBP) in 1990. The efforts during the last two decades resulted in developing an ‘enabling model’ of microfinance, emphasising member ownership, self-help and mutuality, with the prime aim is to empower women and address poverty. The programme focuses on women and believes that localised financial institutions owned and controlled by women are an effective way to alleviate poverty and address gender issues. Kalanjiam Foundation has been promoted primarily for upscaling the Kalanjiam nested institutions model. The approaches of the programme are:

• Organising Kalanjiam self help groups (SHGs) for the poor women and networking them to become independent and interdependent secondary institutions called Cluster Development Associations (CDAs) at panchayat level and Federations at the block level.
• Promoting creative financial products such as savings, credit and insurance by formalizing the existing indigenous practices and mutuality mechanisms among the poor.
• Facilitating the people's organisations to build linkages with banks and formal financial institutions to meet the multiple credit needs of members, collaborate with other development agencies such as the Government to get their entitlements, implement civic programmes in health and education, etc.
• Strengthening existing livelihoods and creating new livelihood opportunities through skill building and market linkages.
• Building replicable intervention designs through research and pilots on the social and development needs of the members such as drinking water, health, education, sanitation, access to basic infrastructure and addressing issues like alcoholism, dowry, gender inequality, etc.
• Identifying and nurturing the latent leadership potential among poor women to emerge as dynamic grassroots leaders to manage and sustain their organisations.
• Enabling the people's organisations to set up fool proof and transparent financial management by evolving policies, setting up systems, rules and procedures and ensuring quality of accounts through auditing.
• The programme has become a movement of poor women, the ‘Kalanjia Iyyakam’, to promote the Kalanjiam model.

Read more on Kalanjiam Community Banking Programme